2010 GameTech Conference in Florida

The third annual Defense GameTech Users’ Conference was held 28 to 31 March at the recently-opened Orlando Hilton. Sponsored by Team Orlando and supported by the US Army Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation (PEO STRI) and the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the conference focused on how the serious games of today enhance military training, and on the technical challenges involved in improving current game technologies to further enhance the training experience for warfighters.

AOS’s Director of North American Operations, Andy Park, represented the company at the event and was swamped by requests to see the CoJACK-VBS2 integration demos of two scenarios, a suicide bomber lurking in an Iraqi marketplace and a package bomb hidden in a downtown London plaza.

In the marketplace scenario, some 30 CoJACK virtual civilians are shopping while a suicide bomber (also a CoJACK agent) looks for an opportunity to detonate and cause maximum carnage. Concurrently, a player-controlled soldier patrols the area looking for the bomber. The challenge for the player/soldier is to identify the bomber using the shoppers’ behaviour as they ID him/her and move away, then eliminating the threat prior to the bomber’s self-detonation.

In the London plaza scenario, CoJACK virtual shoppers and business people congregate in the open plaza until a PA announcement warns of a suspected package bomb. Reacting to the news, the CoJACK agents vacate the area and allow a player-controlled policeman and CoJACK agent police dog to initiate a search for the bomb. The player/policeman challenges in this scenario are crowd control, locating the bomb, observing shoppers/business people for unusual behaviour and interviewing anyone suspicious.

After watching the demos, the majority of viewers said they were most impressed by the real human-like behaviour of the CoJACK virtual civilian-shoppers, i.e. their unscripted reactions, usually run away or surrender, to sinister events as they unfolded around them.

Andy Park would like to thank VBS2’s Bohemia Interactive and Calytrix Technologies for their support and hospitality during the conference.